Steam Deck beta update improves fan whine, but raises GPU temps

pcgamer.com:

Anyone who was blessed with a Steam Deck that came through with the first round of Q1 orders will likely be aware of a glaring issue: the ridiculous fan whine. It's caused upset across the Steam Deck forums, and has seen a bunch of people sending their Decks back to Valve for RMA.

In asking the question "How loud is the Steam Deck?" we discovered it's not the decibels that make the fan an issue, really. Particularly when travelling with our Deck out, we couldn't hear it over the general noise inside the airplane cabin. No, it's the pitch that really takes the biscuit. It's enough to get you relegated to the sofa for the night, after playing with your Deck on full power in bed.

People across the web have been trying all sorts of hacky fixes to try and get a handle on the mosquito-esque noise piercing their eardrums. One Reddit user even reported improvements after jamming electrical tape into their Steam Deck, and although we wouldn't necessarily recommend that as a solution, it did seem to work for some users.

If your Steam Deck fan is whining like a babe that's had its candy stolen, you could always wait for iFixit to come out with replacement fans. Or you could do what we did, and go in for the latest Steam Deck OS beta software update.

The beta OS patch notes don't actually say anything about improving the fan whine specifically, but it's become clear from trawling the comments on several Reddit posts that many have seen improvements since updating. The drawback, as many report, is increased GPU temps.

Firing up Euro Truck Simulator 2 on the Deck, we found our baseline to test from. On high graphics settings, we got around 63–68°C on full load, with the fan pitch whirring up to somewhere in the region of 1000Hz. That